I'm working on some LaTeX documents, and I started getting dumbfounded that the fonts were regenerated each day by mktexpk. This behaviour was not displayed on my laptop. With some searching I could deduce the following things:
- TeXlive, on Debian, generates the fonts in /tmp/texfonts. Which explains a lot, for starters
- My laptop is not rebooted but wakes from hibernation. Thus /tmp is not deleted, which explains why the already generated fonts did not disappear
- In TeTeX, the previous distribution of (La)TeX, the directory for generating fonts was /var/spool/texmf
Thus, why reverting the behaviour of TeTeX ? One could say that systems are fast enough to produce fonts almost on-the-fly, but this argument might as well be applied to the ever-growing size of hard disks, meaning /var/spool/texmf is a valid place as well.
Maybe I'll write a bug report if I don't find justification for such a choice in the next days.
TeXlive, Debian and fonts
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